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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

If You Don't Have an Opera Singer in your Friend List, You Should Get One

Not only do we have Kyle and Reed playing soccer and tackle football, but on the other extreme we have JR doing a musical, taking a musical theater class, and now...an opera.

Oh yes, you read that right, an opera.

I'll have to back up to explain how an opera even came about.

JR was never 100% okay with not being a lead in Annie this summer. There's another theater here in town that just happened to be doing Annie this fall so, of course, he wanted to give it another go.

And this time around he was cast as Daddy Warbucks.

The same night he got his email about being cast as Daddy Warbucks, he got another email saying that the theater had chosen him to be in the children's chorus of Hansel and Gretel for Opera in the Heights if he wanted to do it.

I immediately put in a call to JD (who knew there was some sort of emergency if I was calling him at 8:30 on a Thursday night...luckily it was a "showbiz" emergency) because who best to ask about an opera than an actual opera singer?

Not only did JD know all about the opera company, but even better, JD had just finished starring in Hansel and Gretel this summer, so he knew all about the actual show.

He was super helpful with all kinds of information like that the children's chorus is only on stage the last 15 minutes of the show and the show is in German.

I tried to talk JR out of this show every which way I could think of:

-Practices are 3 days a week, with 7 shows for only 15 minutes of stage time.

-I told him the show was in German.

(He just looked at me, said, "guten tag", and asked if he should start working on his German accent.)

-Then we brought out the big guns and said that since practices are on Saturdays he won't be able to go deer hunting this year.

He still picked the opera!

So, it looks like we have an opera in our future, I'm crossing my fingers he has to wear lederhosen for his costume!!!

With all these theatrical going ons I went ahead and redid his headshot. I'm sure one day I'll have to spend a bunch of money for a "real" one, but for now I'm still taking them and printing them out at Costco.